I believe it will become a high demand item for the Alpha Clone gang once they get their skills up but we will have to see what CCP does in regards to the availability of the Gnosis – it looks like every subscribed toon between now and November will be getting one so we could see a flood on the market but once that subsides they could become fairly scarce once the numbers get dwindled down.

I’ve been playing around with some fits for the Gnosis and see some decent PvE options for it. I’m most familiar with Projectile Weapons and Angel Space so the fit below, which is based off of Abbadon21’s Caldari Alpha Clone Mission Fit, is geared towards that and it’s a fit that I believe would make a solid Hi-Sec PvE/Exploration Vessel.

I’d take on Refuge and Dens, I think it could also run the High-Sec Ghost Sites so I would run this with a Mobile Depot in the hold and carry both a Data and a Relic Analyzer which would give you the option to run any Exploration sites you come across.

For the Unrated Complexes I’d go for the Lookout for sure and I’d give the Watch a try but would take it slow to test the waters.

The only DED site it can fit into that you’ll scan down in High-Sec is the 4/10 and I’m not completely sure about it’s ability to run that second room in the 4/10 DED site but it may be doable, another one to take slow and test the waters? The biggest issue with the Gnosis is its speed – she’s a turtle – so while many ships can blitz that second room in the 4/10 the Gnosis will be on field much longer and with 30+ rats engaging it may be too much? It is worth a test though 🙂

With the Alpha Clones hitting this November I’m sure many are looking at ways to make some ISK with the influx of new players we will (hopefully!) see. I believe one of the more effective ways to make some ISK with the introduction of the Alpha Clones will be with some thoughtful market speculation.

I think we will see a slight increase in the price of all of items that an Alpha Clone can use which I conceive in three broad categories:

Hulls – The ‘popular’ T1 Frigate, Destroyer and Cruiser hulls

Modules – All of the ‘Meta’ Modules will increase in price

Drones – ‘Integrated’ and ‘Faction’ drones will see a price hike

How do you get in on this? Carefully… if you’ve got an Indy Alt, get him producing 10/20 BPCs for the popular T1 hulls and prepare for the eventual increased buying rate of them. If you’re into Ratting start hoarding all the ‘Meta’ Modules that drop. For the Drones you’ve got two options, farm some LP and buy the Faction Drones or explore out in the Drone Regions and look for the Integrated BPCs.

The Aegis Sovereignty System is not enjoyed by everyone but then it’s not meant to be – it was implemented to shake things up…

This is a comment on a reddit post from a day or two ago:

“Just want to let you know, and this comes straight from the top…it will get a lot worse if we are unshackled from the weight of sov. We do what we do because it should be painful to have as much as you have. The old goon meme used to be “Diplomacy OP” but Aegis made vast swaths of underutilized space uncomfortable, in hopes of balkanizing null. All FEIGN have done since Aegis is poke sov for fights from Curse, accidentally win some, and then literally give it away to anyone that asked with no strings attached, to populate space and make it more interesting for small entities. It got to the point where every time we saw a final freeport station timer that we were likely to win we started dropping “hey, who wants a free station in null-sec?” in random public channels because we already had too much. We are good for the game, just not your 20k blues game.”

Now that some of the dust has settled after the initial announcement of Clone States and CCP’s follow up Dev Blog it feels like the majority of folk that play EVE are optimistic about what the F2P Alpha Clones will bring to New Eden while being wary about about the ways they could be used to take advantage of game play situations. The two biggest concerns, which I’m totally on-board with, are:

The use of multiple Alpha Clone Alts.

The use of Alpha Clone Alts for High-Sec harassment/Suicide Ganking.

I know I’ll be taking advantage of having an Alpha Clone Alt and will take the advantage as many times as I’m legally allowed. As for the Suicide Ganking there are decent arguments coming from both sides and it looks like, at least for the initial release, CCP is leaning towards allowing it and I can understand their thoughts, they don’t way to limit the game-play available to the F2P crowd, but I’m going to predict that a month or so after Alpha Clones get to New Eden, probably just after they’ve had time to fully skill into the Catalyst, CCP will limit the Alpha Clone Safeties to Yellow while in High-Sec which will disallow their use in Suicide Ganking but still allow them to cause some trouble in High-Sec.

I’m definitely not a super experienced FC but I do feel like I have a decent level of knowledge in regards to the grid war/battlefields of EVE and can hopefully pass on some basics about how to position your fleet on grid.

So lets get right to it…

There are exceptions of course, a ship scanned down in mid space is one example, but lets go with the assumption that the majority of engagements in EVE happen around a fixed spot, it’s incredibly rare to see or hear of a battle taking place out in open space. Some may not understand what I mean when I say a fixed spot, what I’m thinking of are Jump Gates, Stations, FW Beacons, POCOs, etc…

An important thing to keep in mind is that in most cases the fleet that lands on-grid and starts positioning first will have an initial advantage. This is why you commonly see fleets holding on either side of a Gate waiting on the other to jump through – neither fleet wants to give up their on-grid positioning advantage.

When you’re thinking of positioning you’ve got four basic groups to keep in mind:

DPS

Logi

EWar

Tackle

For the actual positioning you want your DPS group to be nearest the enemy fleet, the actual range will be totally dependent on your weapon systems and what you’re up against.

Your Logi group should position themselves on the far side away from the enemy fleet but within their optimal range, or just outside of it, to you.

Your EWar group can be with your Logi group or on the far side of them, most EWar boats have solidly long targetting ranges and good ranges for their flavor of Ewar.

Your Tackle group should be working independently away from your main fleet and there are numerous ‘jobs’ they could be performing; they could be trying to get behind the enemy fleet to get you a better position, off catching stragglers, grabbing pings for your fleet to escape to or use as bounces, scouting your escape route, etc…

Very basic thoughts on grid positioning but hopefully it paints a clear picture for any aspiring FC’s out there.

Was thinking about all the folks that will likely extend invites or start up new Corporations in anticipation of all the fresh New Eden’ers we’ll see when the Clone Grades go live and I’ve taken a look at the difference between the skills a brand new post Vanguard toon gets versus the proposed skills each maxed skilled Alpha Clone will have to get an idea of what it would take to build some sort of ‘Skill Book Welcome Package’. Not too surprisingly for each race it was very close… approximately 80,000,000 ISK to purchase all the Skill Books required for them to max out.

I’m going to go with the assumption that most Corporations will not invest 80,000,000 ISK into a brand new pilot but I’d bet they may be willing to invest in getting their new pilots skilled into the Destroyer and Cruiser sized hulls and into which ever weapon systems they can use.

If we use the Caldari Alpha Clone for an example they would need:

Caldari Cruiser

Caldari Destroyer

Heavy Assault Missiles

Heavy Missiles

Light Drone Operation

Light Missiles

Medium Hybrid Turret

Rockets

These eight Skill Books would cost less than 2,000,000 ISK, that’s not a bad investment to make in a new pilot and it’s one that would likely endear them to the Corporation that much more. You could even look at giving them a couple of inexpensive fitted ships to get rolling with – a couple of Frigates, one fitted for PvP and one fitted for PvE could not be overly expensive?

Force multiplication, in military usage, refers to an attribute or a combination of attributes that dramatically increases the effectiveness of an item or group, giving a given number of troops or weapons the ability to accomplish greater things than without. So we take a max-skilled Caldari Alpha Clone and throw them in a Blackbird and add one, two or three of them to our Alpha Toon Caracal fleet supported by our Alpha Toon Scythe logi.

One of the big issues with the Blackbird in that fleet is it’s speed, it’s significantly slower than the Caracal and Scythe, but if you’re pilots are smart they’ll stick themselves on the far side of your Logistics Wing and stay aligned to a bounce warping out when they get primaried.

In my messing with EFT I’ve been playing around with a max-skilled Caldari Alpha toon and it looks like they will have the skills to pilot a decently fit Caracal.

You can mess around a lot with the Caracal but this is a pretty standard small gang fit. For bigger fleets you could pull off the point and replace it with a resist and maybe pull the nano and add a third BCS.

What I will add to the discussion is that I’m stoked for this! I’m hopeful that we’ll see an influx of new players hit New Eden in November and I’m crossing my fingers with more hopes that we’ll see many of those NewBros stick around for the long haul.

I’ve already been messing around with the proposed Alpha Clone skills in EFT to see what a max skilled Alpha will be able to fly and will post some of those thoughts/fits in the coming days.